Will Morrisey Reviews

Plato: Greater Hippias. Harold N. Foster translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. 

Catherine H. Zuckert: Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009. Chapter 4, section iv: “The Sophist’s Inability to Say What Is Noble.”

 

Socrates greets the prominent sophist, Hippias of Elis, newly arrived at Athens, calling him kalos (noble, beautiful) and wise—the word ‘sophist’ itself meaning ‘wise one.’ “What a long time it has been since you have put in at the port of Athens!” Well, yes, “I have no leisure, Socrates,” since the regime in Elis calls on him whenever it needs to transact business with “any of the poleis,” calling upon his ambassadorial skills, “thinking that I am the ablest judge and messenger of the words that are spoken by the several poleis“— particularly formidable Lacedaemon. After all, a truly wise man must be the best judge and also the one most capable of relaying messages accurately, and of understanding their meaning. Socrates appears impressed, indeed enthusiastic, exclaiming, “That’s what it is, Hippias, to be a truly wise and perfect man!” Hippias looks like the perfect specimen of humanness itself, traveling from polis to polis, serving Elis but in some respects a citizen of the world, or at least of Greece as a whole, its many poleis with their several regimes. He seems at once a patriot and one who transcends city-states and their regimes. What is more, privately, he makes “much money from the young,” whom he charges for his teaching, while “confer[ring] upon them still greater benefits than you receive,” even as he “benefits[s]” his own city-state, “as a man must who is not to be despised but held in high repute among the many.” Hippias seems to square all the circles. But is his seeming a reality? If, for example, he has no leisure, when does he have the time to think, to become wise, a ‘soph-ist’? Or does his sophistry mean that, having become wise already, he no longer needs to think?

As always, Socrates has a question. “What in the world is the reason why those men of old whose names are called great in respect to wisdom—Pittacus, and Bias, and the Milesian Thales with his followers—and also the later ones, down to Anaxagoras, are all or most of them, found to refrain from the affairs of the polis?” Because they were not me, Hippias replies; they “were not able to compass by their wisdom both public and private matters.” They were wise privately but lacked political wisdom. Their public reputation was a recognition by the many of their sound personal advice; they were the Dr. Phils of their time. 

Hippias affirms Socrates’ suggestion, that “your art has progressed” since then, “just as the other arts have progressed,” and so the ancients “who were concerned with wisdom are of no account in comparison with you.” This might suggest that the art of sophistry might progress still further, that Hippias might still have much to learn, that he is not fully wise after all. But Hippias doesn’t take the hint. Instead, he confides a trade secret: although he knows his superiority to the ancients, “I am in the habit of praising the ancients and our predecessors rather than the men of the present day” as “a precaution against the envy of the living and through fear of the wrath of those who are dead.” (Hippias appears to presume that the dead only get wind of his public statements, not his private ones.) Socrates makes a show of agreement, pointing to the sophist Gorgias, who came to Athens and “spoke excellently in the public assembly, and in his private capacity, by giving exhibitions and associating with the young, he earned and received a great deal of money from this city.” “Our friend here, Prodicus,” has done the same thing. [1] “But none of those ancients ever thought fit to exact money as payment for his wisdom or to give exhibitions among people of various places; so simple-minded were they, and so unconscious of the fact that money is of greatest value.” And indeed, Socrates himself, admittedly no sophist, no wise man but a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, charges no money for his conversations. 

Socratic irony is lost on Hippias. “Why Socrates, you know nothing of the beauties of this. For if you were to know how much money I have made, you would be amazed.” Not only has he far surpassed the ancients, but he has bested his competitors, his contemporaries: “I pretty well think that I have made more money than any other two sophists together,” including Protagoras, older and more famous than Hippias but surpassed by him in getting money out of Sicily. Still in seeming agreement, Socrates cites the earlier sophists “of the school of Anaxagoras,” who likewise missed the money boat, and Anaxagoras himself, who made money and then lost it “so mindless was his wisdom”—he, who taught that Mind rules the universe. Hippias caps the point by aphorizing, “A wise man must be wise for himself especially, and the test of this is, who makes the most money.” Evidently, even Hippias’ service to his city-state amounts to an advertisement for himself, an indirect means of lining his pockets. And of course, Elis is his city-state; its prosperity may well redound to Hippias’ benefit. For Hippias, a ‘proof’ consists not of a logical argument, nor of a right assessment of another’s soul, but of a visible, tangible thing. He is an ’empiricist.’

But not so fast, Hippias. Have you made the most money at Lacedaemon, the city-state you have visited most frequently? This elicits Hippias’ first oath: “No, by Zeus. I never made anything at all” there. Socrates finds this obvious self-contradiction “a marvel, and a wondrous one at that.” And so he asks, your wisdom makes “better men in regard to virtue?” And yet the Lacedaemonians desire virtue as much as the citizens of other city-states and they have the money to pay him. Nor do they educate their children better than you, Hippias, as Hippias readily affirms. Nor did the fathers of the young Lacedaemonians “begrudge it to their children to become as good as possible.” Further, Lacedaemon is well-ruled, and in well-ruled city states “virtue is most highly honored”? And you are, as you say, demonstrably the best at “transmitting” virtue to others, the proof of which is seen in one’s earnings, which you didn’t get from the Lacedaemonian regime or from its citizens? 

What is more, since sophistry an art, why should it have a different effect in Lacedaemon than elsewhere? The best teacher of horsemanship could teach it Thessaly, be “most honored” there, and in all of Greece, receiving more money than all of the other teachers of that art. This being so, as Hippias concedes, “then will not he who is able to transmit the doctrines that are of most value for the acquisition of virtue be most highly honored in Lacedaemon and make the most money, if he so wishes, and in any other of the Greek poleis that is well governed?” Tell us why, then, Lacedaemon failed to lavish you with drachmas? Why, it is because they are hidebound, Hippias replies. “It is not the inherited usage of the Lacedaemonians to change their laws or to educate their children differently from what is customary.” They resist progress. Do you mean to say, Hippias, that “for the Lacedaemonians” it is “the hereditary usage not to act rightly, but to commit errors?” Surely, if a father has the choice between following the traditions of the ancestors, the ancients, and doing what is best for them, he will choose to do what is best, educate the young better, not worse? But (now changing ground) “it is not lawful for them to give [the young men] a foreign education,” Hippias explains, shifting the blame from Lacedaemonian traditionalism to their suspicion of the foreign. The Lacedaemonians love to listen to me; “they applaud me”; but they do not pay me much because “it is not the law.”

This raises the question of the status of law. “Do you say that law is an injury to the polis, or a benefit?” It is made “with benefit in view,” according to the opinion that it is beneficial, but “if the law is badly made,” if the art of lawmaking is defective in that instance, “it is injurious.” Hippias agrees that lawmakers, those who ‘craft’ the laws (as our eminently artistic American lawmakers like to say, nowadays), do so for “the greatest good to the polis,” and to fail to do so would make it “impossible to enjoy good government.” If those who make the laws “miss the good” they have “missed the lawful and the law,” yes? That is, law is an instrument crafted by lawmakers for the sake of the good, which is therefore not identical to the law. Yet to be good law, true law, the law must serve the good? Hippias cannot disagree: “Speaking accurately, Socrates, that is true, however, men are not accustomed to think so.” What men? Those who know, or those who don’t know? Why, those who don’t know, “the many.” As to those who do know, they must “think that in truth for all men that which is more beneficial is more lawful than that which is less beneficial”? Well, Hippias answers, “they think it is so in truth.” Hippias, a sophist or ‘wise one,’ that knower of truth, allows the possibility that there may be a disjunction between wisdom conceived as knowledge of the good and wisdom conceived as he conceives it, as money-making. 

If so, Socrates persists, for the Lacedaemonians it must then be “more beneficial to be educated in your education, which is foreign, than in the local education”; more, beneficial things are lawful; therefore, it is more lawful to be educated “contrary to the law” in Lacedaemon. “I agree to that,” Hippias now states, “for you seem to be making your argument in my favor.” If only the Lacedaemonians saw what Socrates sees, they would have given me money, the measure of wisdom. Arguments do not prove anything, but they can be useful. Pesky logic says otherwise, however: turning to their listeners (thus appealing to the opinion sophists seek to manipulate) Socrates says, “My friends, we find that the Lacedaemonians are law-breakers, and that too in the most important affairs—they who are regarded as the most law-abiding of men.” Their reputation, the public opinion not only of themselves but of all Greeks, is mistaken. If so, Hippias, “what sort of discourses” do these lawless upholders of law and of tradition enjoy and applaud you for? Astronomy? No. Geometry? No, some of them don’t even know arithmetic. “The processes of thought,” then? “Far from it indeed, by Zeus.” Nor harmonies. Rather than such matters of the mind, such as it were Anaxagorean concerns, they love to hear about “the genealogies of heroes and men,” the “foundations of cities in ancient times and, in short, about antiquity in general”—precisely those things progressive, master of the art of sophistry Hippias has deprecated. “For their sake”—that is, for his own sake—Hippias “has been obliged to learn all that sort of thing by heart and practice it thoroughly.” But does that not mean that Hippias cares for something other than money, only? Does he not love to be applauded, honored? 

This is enough to elicit an oath not from Hippias but now from Socrates. “By Zeus, Hippias, it is lucky for you that the Lacedaemonians do not enjoy hearing one recite the list of our archons from Solon’s time,” as it is very long. [2] But Socrates, “I can remember fifty names.” My mistake, Hippias, “I did not understand that you possess the science of memory” as well as the science of wisdom. But in both cases, what are your arts for? The Lacedaemonians “make use of you as children make use of old women, to tell stories agreeably.” They rule you, not you them; for all your supposed wisdom, betokened by wealth, they don’t pay you a dime. This brings out a “by Zeus” from the sophist; on the contrary, my reputation in Lacedaemon derives from “telling story about noble and beautiful pursuits,” exactly the virtues Socrates had initially attributed to him. I recount what the pursuits “of a young man should be.” That is, the memorized genealogies of heroes, men, and cities teach virtue. His finest speech consists of the story of Neoptolemus, who, after the fall of Troy, “asked Nestor what the noble and beautiful pursuits were,” and received a list of “many lawful and beautiful pursuits” (if not necessarily noble ones?). Hippias invites Socrates to listen to his discourse, which he will deliver at a school tomorrow. And be sure that you bring “others who are able to judge of discourses that they hear.” In the Greek poetic tradition, Nestor, the elderly adviser of warriors at Troy, gives counsel that sometimes doesn’t work out well, although this may register the unpredictability of gods or luck more than unwisdom; Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, has a decidedly mixed record in terms of both virtue (he seems to have had a cruel streak) and fortune (he founded a city but was killed by Orestes). Promising to go, “God willing” (the philosopher is more mindful of circumstances than either warriors or sophists), Socrates quickly turns to a philosophic question, having been “reminded” of the beautiful “just at the right moment.” In doing so, concocts an imaginary questioner who supposedly asked him “very insolently” how he knew what the beautiful is. The insolent questioner asks exactly the kind of question Socrates himself famously asks. Claiming that he vowed to ask the next of the “wise men” he met, in order to return to renew the dialectic with his questioner, he puts the question to Hippias. As usual, the sophist does not lack confidence. If I cannot do this, Hippias says, “my profession would be worthless and ordinary.” Indeed. Socrates promises to imitate the insolent questioner by interjecting “exceptions,” counter-examples,” to what Hippias will say.

Just, wise, men and good things are so by justice, wisdom, and goodness; beautiful things are beautiful “by the beautiful.” Very well, what is the beautiful? Hippias asserts that there is no difference between the beautiful (what the beautiful is) and beautiful things (what is beautiful). All right, but the questioner wanted to know what the beautiful is, to which Hippias answers that a beautiful maiden is beautiful—a what-is-beautiful answer, not the answer to the question. The questioner remarks that a beautiful mare is also beautiful, as are a beautiful lyre and even a beautiful pot. All of these objects share beautiful in common, but they are different things. How can what the beautiful is be the same thing as what is beautiful?

Hippias is offended at the mention of the lowly pot. “Socrates, who is the fellow? What an uncultivated person, who has the impudence to mention such worthless things in a dignified discussion!” To this ad hominem argument Socrates immediately but ironically yields: “That’s the sort of person he is, Hippias, not elegant, but vulgar, thinking of nothing but the truth.” Yet isn’t a well-wrought Grecian pot beautiful? Yes, for what it is, but “it does not deserve to be regarded as beautiful in comparison with a mare and a maiden and all the beautiful things,” things innately superior to a pot. Yes, but if we compare maidens or wise men to gods, will they too not be inferior in beauty? And even so, we have not found what “the absolute beauty,” beauty itself, is. 

Just as we begin to suspect that Hippias cannot think abstractly, only concretely and instrumentally (as would a materialist, Zuckert observes), he tells Socrates that if that is all the questioner is looking for, “nothing is easier to answer.” Beauty is that “by which all other things are adorned and by the addition of which they are made to appear beautiful.” Tell him that the beautiful “is nothing else than gold.” To the sophist, a thing is as it appears to be. The sophist, who takes money to be the coin of wisdom, takes beauty to be less than skin deep, a thing of surfaces. The wise man coats his speech with appealing words, glistening appearances. Money is gold, gold is money.

Socrates’s vulgar questioner is ready with a counter-example. Phidias the sculptor doesn’t cover his beautiful statue of Athena (goddess of the wisdom Hippias claims to possess, calling himself a ‘sophist’) with gold. His statue is made of ivory. A beautiful pot may hold soup, which may be nutritious but is seldom beautiful. The statue is ivory all the way through; it beautiful; it does not merely appear to be beautiful. Don’t even talk with this fellow “when he asks such questions,” noble-by-appearance, wise-by-appearance Hippias advises. Socrates accordingly shifts to another, related question: Is the ladle of gold or a ladle of fig wood more appropriate to spooning soup? The ladle of fig wood, Hippias replies. But why did Phidias “not make the middle parts of the eyes also of ivory, but of stone, procuring stone as similar as possible to the ivory,” since the ivory is beautiful? The beautiful stone is also beautiful, Hippias stipulates, so long as it is “appropriate.” Then, it will be ugly when not appropriate? Emphatically so—indeed, “if anyone has anything to say against this, you may say I know nothing at all.” Hippias assumes that he knows quite a lot, that he has escaped the dialectic, whereas the philosopher is famous for asserting that indeed he knows nothing except that he does not know. To prove that he knows quite a lot, Hippias ventures a definition of what a beautiful way of life is, implying that he knows not only what is beautiful but what is noble. “I say, then, that for every man and everywhere”—universally—it is “most beautiful to be rich and healthy, and honored by the Greeks, to reach old age, and, after providing a beautiful funeral for his deceased parents, to be beautifully and splendidly buried by his own offspring.” Wealth, health, honor, longevity, giver and receiver of beautiful funerals—such is the fitting, the appropriate. As Zuckert writes, “the sophist wants to be admired everywhere, by everyone” for his wisdom, but this depends upon the opinion of both the few and the many. The sophist wants self-sufficiency but depends upon reputation, granted by others. That is, the profitability of his art, whether in money or in honor, depends upon his ability to defend his art in the face of Socrates, in the face of a philosopher, in terms of the rational dialectic he would prefer to avoid.

Socrates congratulates Hippias. The philosopher now swearing by Hera, the kind goddess, for “coming to my assistance”—well, “to the best of your ability.” The appearance of Hippias is one thing, his nature another. He is neither gold nor ivory, all the way through. But, Socrates conjectures, the questioner will laugh at the answer. If so, Hippias assures him he will “be laughing at himself and will himself be laughed at by those present”; the questioner will lose ‘face,’ the appearance of wisdom, the honor that accrues to the appearance of wisdom. Not only that, Socrates says; more alarmingly, the questioner may beat me with a stick. Is he your master, Socrates? Or does Athens so “disregard justice and allow the citizens to beat one another unjustly?” On the contrary, Hippias, “the beating would be just, I think.” Now it is finally time for Hippias to ask a question: Why do you think so? Because the questioner “asked for the absolute beautiful,” that “by which everything to which it is added has the property of being beautiful.” You have evaded the question, but I, the questioner, have caught you and I shall now punish you, in justice. (Hippias could of course ask, ‘What is justice?’ but that would only suggest that he sees the questioner’s vulgar-but-true point, that the distinction between what beauty is and what is beautiful must be a real distinction, that ‘What is’ questions ‘make sense.’) The questioner will ask, bringing his own concrete example into the dialectic, if “the stranger from Elis”—patriotism cuts both ways—claims that “for Achilles it was beautiful to be buried later than his parents, and for his grandfather Aeacus, and all the others who were born of gods, and for the gods themselves”—some of whom overthrew the older gods, the Olympians having overthrown the Titans. Hippias can only sputter, recurring to an argumentum ad hominem, “these questions of the fellow’s are not even respectful to religion.” Socrates does not deny it, preferring respectfully to change the subject to the demigod hero, Heracles, who didn’t bury his parents, one of them being Zeus. Hippias continues to retreat before the dialectical onslaught. I didn’t mean to include the gods in my definition, or those who were children of gods. So, the beautiful is the fitting, the appropriate, then? Not even that, as a man might wear clothes that fit him and still be “ridiculous,” as Hippias understands. Socrates pounces, once again. “It could not be the fitting” to make things “appear more beautiful than they are,” to not “let them appear as such as they are.” 

Still, “we must”—once again—attempt “to say what that is which makes things be beautiful.” Hippias gives it another try: “the fitting, Socrates, makes things both be and appear beautiful by its presence.” He has, at last (and at least) managed to separate an idea from things. This, Socrates remarks, means that things really beautiful must also appear to be beautiful. But why, then, is there so much “strife and contention” over what things are beautiful? If they were beautiful and appeared to be beautiful, and if that connection were necessary, then no such controversy would erupt. If the fitting both makes things beautiful and makes them appear so, then the coincidence of beauty and beautiful appearance would hold; since it doesn’t the fitting can at most only make things beautiful in reality, in their being, or in their appearance. Speaking very much as a sophist, Hippias chooses to say that the fitting makes things appear beautiful; to a sophist, a word fitly spoken gilds being with an attractive surface. But this is to admit that Socrates is right; the fitting cannot produce one dimension of beauty, namely, real beauty, the beauty of a thing by nature, its ‘inner’ beauty, as it were. We still haven’t discovered what beauty is.

The putatively wise knower now scales back on his claim to know, telling Socrates that he knows “that if I should go away into solitude and meditate alone by myself, I could tell [what the beautiful is] with the most perfect accuracy.” A reader might be excused for suspecting that the honor-loving, money-loving sophist wants to escape this dialogue with whatever remains of his reputation intact. “Ah, don’t boast, Hippias”; stay with us, “for Heaven’s sake,” and “find it in my presence or, if you please, join me, as you are now doing, in looking for it.” If we find it now, I will not be a nuisance” to you, anymore—no idle threat, given the precarity of Hippias’ profession, dependent as it is on the approval of the few and the many. Socrates has caught him in another contradiction, this one not in thought but in his way of life. To save his reputation, Hippias must go; to save his reputation, Hippias must stay. Socrates has turned the sophist’s tactic of ad hominem argument against the sophist. In the event, Hippias stays, and Socrates begins the inquiry anew.

He approaches the question by invoking a new idea or ‘abstraction,’ the useful. Perhaps the beautiful is “whatever is useful for us.” For example, beautiful eyes are not those that seem to be beautiful but are sightless; beautiful eyes are “those which are able and useful for seeing.” Similarly, “the whole body is beautiful” when fully ‘functional.’ And not only natural objects but artifacts, customs, and laws. We look at each thing with regard to “how it is formed by nature, how it is wrought, how it has been enacted”; “the useful we call beautiful, and beautiful in the way in which it is useful, and for the purpose for which it is useful, and at the time when it is useful.” More than two millennia later, Americans still exclaim ‘Beautiful!” when something ‘works.’ Beleaguered Hippias quickly agrees.

Oh, but no. A powerless thing is a useless thing. If usefulness is beauty, then power is beautiful and lack of power is “disgraceful or ugly.” The money-lover likes the sound of that: “Decidedly. Other things, Socrates, testify for us that this is so, but especially political affairs; for in political affairs and in one’s own polis to be powerful is the most beautiful of all things, but to be powerless is the most disgraceful of all.” Very well, then is wisdom, your claim to power or authority, “also for this reason the most beautiful thing and ignorance the most disgraceful thing”? Maybe, Hippias cautiously rejoins. And maybe not. If a person cannot do “what he did not know how and was utterly powerless to do,” and if “men do many more bad things than good,” erring involuntarily, then the acts of the powerful cannot necessarily be beautiful and power cannot be beautiful. Hippias then suggests a qualification. The acts that one has the power to do are beautiful “if they are powerful and useful for good.” If so, Socrates says, beautiful persons and customs must be beautiful because they are beneficial, “the beautiful seems to us to be the beneficial.” 

But no. If the beautiful causes the good, if the beautiful “has the nature of a kind of father,” then the good cannot be the caused by the beautiful any more than a father can be his own son. “By Zeus,” the beautiful cannot be the good, or the good beautiful. This “does not please me at all,” Hippias says, himself swearing by Zeus. He is stuck conversing with ugly old Socrates, who pronounces himself to be “at a loss.” As for Hippias, he has nothing more to say, except to recur to his desired escape-hatch: he is “sure I shall find it after meditation.” 

Socrates happily presses on, being a man who is never at a loss for long. Perhaps “the beautiful is that which is pleasing through hearing and sight.” For example, beautiful customs and laws are beautiful for that reason; we are pleased to hear and see Lacedaemonian customs and laws, to take the ones instanced earlier. Socrates prompts Hippias to admit that sensual pleasures, not only laws and customs, are truly pleasurable. This admission may ruin the claim, however, since the act of eating and the act of sexual intercourse can be pleasant but they are hardly pleasant to hear or to see. And if you were to admit that these pleasures are beautiful, you would lose respect among the people, since they “do not seem so to most people,” and you depend upon public opinion to make money. But that is not truly dispositive, since “that is not what [the questioner] asked”: again, he asked not “what seems to most people to be beautiful, but what is so.” So, we still might say “that that part of the pleasant which comes by sight and hearing is beautiful,” despite what the many may suppose. If we say that what is pleasant through sight is beautiful, we do not mean to say that what is pleasant through the other senses is not beautiful.” All these pleasant things “have something identical which makes them beautiful,” both as individual things and collectively. Or, taking another idea, as Hippias now sees, “if we are both just, would not each of us be just also and if each is unjust, would not both again also be unjust”? Now on a roll, as the expression goes, Hippias identifies health, affliction, nobility, wisdom, honor, age and youth as the sort of characteristics the questioner has in mind. But he has a new objection.

“You see, Socrates, you do not consider the entirety of things, nor do they with whom you are in the habit of conversing, but you all test the beautiful and each individual entity by taking them separately and cutting them to pieces. For this reason, you fail to observe that embodiments of reality are by nature so great and undivided. And now you have failed to observe to such a degree that you think there is some affection or reality which pertains to both of these together, but not to each individually, or again to each, but not to both; so unreasoning and undiscerning and foolish and unreflecting is your state of mind.” That is, Hippias wants to emphasize the unity of the cosmos, its homogeneity, against the Socratic claim of a heterogeneous whole. The homogeneous cosmos fits nicely with Hippias’ sophistry because the more the cosmos is conceived as homogeneous, undifferentiated, the less reason, with its principle of non-contradiction, can understand it. As Zuckert remarks, Hippias “embodies a way of life based on such a homogeneous cosmology,” posing “an important test of the rationale for Socratic inquiry” and, one might add, to any “rationale” at all. Hippias claims to understand reality all at once and as a whole; again, as Zuckert has it, Hippias has no felt need for dialogue because he is unerotic, supposing he already has wisdom, already knows the nature of the cosmos.

Unfortunately for Hippias, “human affairs,” as Socrates replies, “are not what a man wishes, but what can”; wishful thinking doesn’t make the wish ‘come true.’ Hippias now tries to bluff his way out: “You will speak to one who knows, Socrates,” a soph-ist, “for I know the state of mind of all who are concerned with discussion; but nevertheless, if you prefer, speak.” “Well, I do prefer.”

And now, Hippias is really in for it. “Are you and I one or are you and I two?” Socrates begins. That is, are we both an odd number and an even number? Undeniably so. Therefore, “what both are, each is, and what each is, both are.” This establishes the principle of heterogeneous unity. By the same logic, “some things are so and some are not so.” Pleasures through sight and through hearing are distinct as to the senses through which they come to us, but they are both beautiful. You yourself have “conceded that both and each were beautiful.” If so, “if both are beautiful, they must be beautiful by that essence which belongs to both. So it is, with strength and “countless other cases.” That is, Socrates has proved that the cosmos is not homogeneous, that it encompasses heterogeneous parts. If so, then if a pleasurable thing may not be beautiful (as they have already agreed), pleasure is not the same as beauty; if it were, then all pleasurable things would be beautiful. 

Hippias can no longer dispute the argument. He can dispute the worth of the argument. “What do you think all [philosophizing] this amounts to? It is mere scrapings and shavings of discourse, divided into bits.” It is sophistry that is “beautiful and of great worth” because sophistry can “convince the audience,” “carry off the greatest of prizes, the salvation of oneself, one’s property, and one’s friends,” unlike these “petty arguments” of yours, “mere talk and nonsense,” by which you “appear to be a fool”—whether you are or not. Given the coming trial of Socrates, in which the philosopher fails to defend himself against his accusers in front of a jury of Athenian citizens, would Socrates not be better off if he were a sophist? To recur to the earlier argument, Hippias claims to be the noble mare, denigrating Socrates as the lowly pot. Socrates may be beautiful, but only in an inferior way.

Socrates agrees, ironically. Yes, “my dear Hippias you are blessed because you know the things a man ought to practice, and have, as you say, practiced them satisfactorily,” while “I, as it seems, am possessed by some accursed fortune, so that I am always wandering and perplexed, and, exhibiting my perplexity to you wise men, am in turn reviled by you in speech whenever I exhibit it.” Why, I am so confused, “I do not even know what the beautiful itself is.” It is questionable, then, whether I am better to be alive than dead; in this way, the sophist’s accusation loses its force, not because it is false but because it is the sophist who fails to see “the entirety of things” even while asserting the homogeneity of things. In the case at hand, the danger of capital punishment might not be a real danger at all, inasmuch as I might be better off if my fellow Athenians go ahead and kill me. That, too, is a matter for philosophic inquiry. There is, however, one sure benefit to the philosophic life. I may not know what the beautiful is, but “I think I know the meaning of the proverb, ‘beautiful things are difficult.'” To move from wishful thinking to rational thinking is difficult because the cosmos is heterogeneous, complex, in need of rational explication, not as simple as the sophist wants it to be.

 

Notes

1. Prodicus has come down to us as the teller of the story of the ‘choice of Hercules,” who chooses chaste Lady Virtue over seductive but injurious Lady Vice. Is this wholesome teaching the sort of thing that makes Prodicus Socrates’ friend, if still a sophist? No other sophist is called Socrates’ friend in this dialogue, including Hippias—despite Socrates’ friendly greeting. 
2. Plato’s readers will recall the Ion, in which Socrates dialogues with the eponymous rhapsode, a prodigy of memory who seldom bothers to think. 

 

Glenn Ellmers: The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy. New York: Encounter Books, 2023.

 

If our time is out of joint, as most agree, why is this so? In the United States, the regime of the American Founders, consisting of popular sovereignty within the framework of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, with a set of ruling offices fitted to such rule within that framework, has become entangled with a bureaucratic regime operating within the framework of hopes of historical ‘progress’—typically defined as social egalitarianism. As a result, “it has been a long time since the people of the United States fully exercised their sovereign authority to choose the officials in government whose primary job is, or is supposed to be, to protect the people’s natural rights according to the Constitution”; our ‘regime’ has become post-constitutional.”

Without forgetting the virtues of classical antiquity or of the Bible, the Founders also drew from modern political philosophers, especially Locke and Montesquieu. But modern philosophy reached a crisis when philosophers first doubted that right could be derived from nature, ‘ought’ from ‘is,’ turning first to the course of events, ‘History,’ as the source of right (on the claim that rational, and rationally discernible laws of history were sweeping mankind forward to thoroughgoing control of nature), and then to ever-louder claims that neither God, nor nature, nor History provided any source of right at all, that the meaning of human life was whatever we choose it to be. In practice, this has meant that the rationalist and anti-rationalist strains of modern philosophy, “relentlessly diverging,” have issued in, first, the rule of “scientific and bureaucratic experts in the corporate world and government,” who deploy “empirical disciplines such as engineering, sociology, epidemiology, criminology, and economic modeling to justify their rational administration of society,” obviating “the old-fashioned need for the consent of the governed,” but also in the rise of persons justifying their rule on the “nihilistic” claims of postmodernism, which dismisses “fields of knowledge an intellectual disciplines that had been considered objectively true” as “hegemonic, white, male constructs.” As usual, any criticism of a real or supposed ruling class’s right to rule implies a claim to rule by a would-be or newly ensconced ruling class, and so it has been with the New Left. The remarkable thing is that this same ruling or semi-ruling class has come to embrace both rationalism and irrationalism at the same time, a move that does indeed put the principle of non-contradiction, the soul of rationalism, to the test. But in the eyes of the new ruling class, “this irreconcilable conflict between scientific bureaucracy and woke irrationality,” this “tension between Hegel and Nietzsche” (both transformed, astonishingly, into avatars of egalitarianism) makes out-of-jointness sort of a good thing. “Permanent revolutionary struggle” has become “an end in itself.” There is no ‘end of History,” no utopia at the end of the Rainbow Coalition, “just the permanent revolution.” 

As for those who would return the United States to its founding principles, Ellmers cautions that that is easier said than done. “In what ways would James Madison’s republican government need to be adapted to the conditions of the 21st century? Which principles would remain the same and which would require updating in light of current geopolitics social media; digital capitalism; medical, military, and transportation technology?” And as to ‘family values,’ “even many hard-core MAGA voters would find the moral restrictions of the founding era oppressive.” Can philosophy, can political philosophy, get us out of the cave it has dug for ourselves?

“A major reason our political crisis is so bitter and infuriating is that both sides increasingly regard each other as simply incomprehensible”; “we no longer see reality in the same way.” On the Left, we find “a secular theology cobbled together from various modern European philosophers,” including not only Hegel and Nietzsche but (of course) Marx and, surprisingly, Heidegger. The obvious problem is that these philosophers disagree with one another, and so the Left itself is factionalized. There is the faction “focused on racial grievances” (Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter); there is the “militant anarcho-Marxist wing” (Antifa); and there is the “elite, cosmopolitan oligarchy” that provides much of the funding for the first two factions, confident that it can keep them under control, that way, conceding a place within its bureaucracies for diversity training and other gestures to appease the Wokists. (The same people supposed that they could cause the Soviet Union to ‘evolve’ into a liberal society by means of international trade, before adopting the same futile strategy to the People’s Republic of China.) Speaking of Nietzsche, the real, undemocratized one “accurately foresaw the contemporary phenomena of imperious victimology, et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur humbly groveling while arrogantly ruling.)”

And then there is the New Right. The political philosopher Leo Strauss described the problem at the outset of the Second World War. Young Germans who rejected the Kantianism of the moderate Left and the Marxism of the radical Left despised “the prospect of a planetary society ‘devoted to production and consumption only,'” one that turned even spiritual goods into commodities, fashion accessories. In this, they saw the rise of Nietzsche’s ‘Last Man,’ the one who cannot conceive of God, cannot even wish upon a star (as a pagan might) because he does not know what a star is, know that there could be anything higher than himself. Strauss wrote, “literally anything, the nothing, the chaos, the jungle, the Wild West, the Hobbian state of nature, seemed to them infinitely better” than that to the Rightists of the 1920s. And so, the young “embraced a form of irrationalism” in large measure because rationalism, as set forth by the ‘moderns,’ had become a mediocrity that called itself moderation—even when radicalized by the Marxists, who wanted nothing more than to live safely in the communes of the future, protected from all risk and aspiring to nothing more than contentment. The Hitler Youth came out of such sentiments—essentially moral sentiments, of a sort, and that was the problem. Moral reasoning was abandoned because the Right assumed that the only form of rationalism was modern rationalism.

Ellmers begins to address this dilemma by observing that the tension between reason and custom, philosophy and the city, or (if one considers the philosopher’s way of life and the way of life commended by the religions) Athens and Jerusalem, is as old as philosophy itself. Political philosophy began as an attempt to find philosophic implications in the ways of the city and some benefit to the city in philosophic inquiry—a way of striking a truce between the two. But “today’s intellectual class can offer no rational alternative to postmodern relativism and nihilism”; hence its awkward and likely unsustainable attempt to bring postmodernism into the boardroom. But “we no longer believe any account of justice or morality can be rational, trans-cultural, trans-historical, and—it seems necessary to add today—trans-racial.” “We no longer accept that there can be a theoretically true account of what is good for man.” To understand how this has happened, Ellmers turns not only to Strauss but to that arch-postmodern, Michel Foucault, on the Straussian ground that one must understand any set of arguments or opinions first of all in their own terms. 

Strauss traced modern political philosophy, modern philosophy generally, to Machiavelli, the ultimate source of modern or ‘Enlightenment’ rationalism, the rationalism that aims at conquering Fortune (as Machiavelli puts it) and nature (as his disciple, Francis Bacon, puts it) for human purposes. Neither God nor nature provides the standard for human conduct; the human mind, and especially the human will and passions, provide that standard, with this new form of reasoned inquiry as its servant. This project would not make the philosophic and political dimensions of human life coterminous, with both reconceived as ways of augmenting human power. The moderns claim that the original form of political philosophy, seen in the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon, was wrong because ineffectual. One way in which classical political philosophy was ineffectual was its failure to fully convince pious men that it was not harmful to the city—whether the city of the gods or, later, the City of God.

In his own time, Socrates met his death at the hands of Athenian citizens who suspected him of corrupting the young by inducing them to disbelieve in the gods of the cities and to disrespect their own fathers. Among our contemporaries, Ellmers identifies such academic Strauss students as Harry Neumann and Thomas G. West as persons who side with the Athenians, and he further suspects that Strauss “acknowledged the legitimacy [emphasis added] of Athens’ judgment against Socrates,” and “on a certain level he even regarded Plato as guilty”—that is, legitimately guilty, guilty of violating the laws of Athens, which were attributed to a divine lawgiver. “Relentless and profane questions about the rational grounds of justice and truth” as those things are upheld by the city’s laws may well undermine the city. Today, “both Left and right are enacting and rebelling against Plato’s legacy.” That is because “they are still operating, in important ways, within modern rationalism at its broadest and most optimistic.” This is more obvious on “the mainstream Right” in America, which still clings to “the major features of republicanism: consent, constitutional limited government, religious liberty, and national sovereignty, as well as important elements of traditional morality including the integrity of the family.” The more radical Rightists, most often the young (anticipated by the nihilist, Neumann), thrilling to “the various anti-modern thinkers who disdain the hollowness of bourgeois commercialism,” as seen in the writings of Carl Schmitt, who offers a new sort of “civic piety,” one that sees political life as the conflict between friends and enemies, fellow-citizens and foreigners. Yet this form of radicalism, as Strauss noticed decades ago, never really escapes modern rationalism, as seen in its fundamentally Hobbist conception of human life as a conflict of all against all. It departs from Hobbes not at the root of modernity but in its rejection of Hobbes’s solution to that war, the construction of a mighty Leviathan that will impose peace upon the warring persons and factions. 

While the Left, “at least on the level of slogans, still professes allegiance to many liberal principles such as equality (or equity), cosmopolitanism, universal human rights, etc.” the “ethnocentric anti-racism” of its more radical elements mimics the tightly wound communalism of the ancient polis, with its “moral seriousness and spiritual zeal found in the closed and intimate societies of the ancient world.” This “yearning for the holy city” comports badly with modern rationalism and with rationalism simply, “Plato’s cosmopolitan legacy.” 

Platonic political philosophy attempted to make and to keep philosophy within the “caste of educated gentlemen.” But Machiavelli’s prince is no gentleman, and modern philosophers have exhibited little of Plato or Aristotle’s patience in dealing with gentlemen. The political consequence of this impatience initially was as Machiavelli outlined: alternatively, the modern, absolutist prince, forcefully eliminating the aristocrat-oligarchs who stand in the way of his rule over the people, or the modern republic, also ruling at the expense of ‘the few.’ This much Tocqueville saw and described, a few centuries after Machiavelli. Tocqueville also saw how this democratizing tendency of modernity might be countered by a new type of oligarchy, no more gentlemanly than the new prince or the newly empowered people, an oligarchy composed of industrial capitalists and/or government administrators who would rule the people by giving them what they want—safety, income, and a show of deference. Modern democratization also played out in “the attempt to popularize philosophic education, the ambitious conceit at the heart of the Enlightenment,” a project that “becomes extremely dangerous if there is—as Plato suggests—a kind of tyrannical impulse lurking in the philosopher’s uninhibited eros” for wisdom, his philo-sophia. That quest leads, in Plato’s Republic, to the rule of “philosopher-kings.” In this regime, “the philosophic legislator, or tyrant (insofar as he is above the law), rules indirectly but nevertheless powerfully, not with a sword, one might say, but with a shadow,” the shadow of myths crafted by poets closely supervised by the philosophers. In Xenophon’s Hiero, the tyrant worries that the philosopher-poet Simonides might well overthrow him, become the new tyrant or man above the law. Like the tyrant, the philosopher is shameless, as indeed those animated by eros incline to be, as more than suggested in the old-fashioned term, ‘shameless hussy.’ The question, however, is the object of one’s eroticism, and where it leads.

The philosophic question then becomes, is the man above the law not only a ‘tyrant’ in the eyes of the city and its conventions but a nihilist? Are “all philosophers” nihilists? Are all “fixed moral rules and authoritative traditions” “completely groundless”? Have philosophers discovered “that every actual regime rests entirely on myth and absurdity”? Not so fast, Strauss’s student, Harry V. Jaffa, replied. In fact, political communities mix natural and conventional justice because the conventions of a viable city, one whose regime lasts for a while, must have some connection to reality. Nothing comes of nothing, and that goes for the God of the Bible, too, who exists before He brings something out of nothing. While the nihilist “argues that all justice is entirely conventional, without any natural or divine support,” with philosopher-nihilists alone strong enough to endure this truth, actual classical political philosophers (Aristotle, for example) observe that human beings have a nature, a nature that finds its purpose in the attainment of happiness understood as the exercise of the distinctively human characteristic, the exercise of human nature, which is reason. Socrates was right to understand the life ruled by reason as inquiring, skeptical, “zetetic,” but that is hardly the same thing as the denial of natural right, the attempt to replace all of nature with constructs animated by the human will. “Undiluted natural right, according to Jaffa (and, I believe, Strauss), is explosive not because it masks cosmic emptiness, but because perfect justice is too potent, too demanding, for man’s imperfect nature.” Classical political philosophy is ‘politic’ philosophy, a philosophy that understands one form of wisdom as sophia but another form of wisdom as phronesis. 

Nihilists contend that the ascent from the cave of conventional opinion, the philosopher’s ascent from the city, must collapse into the abyss of nihilism, like Icarus falling to his death from the sky. But what if, when the philosophers return to the cave (as Socrates himself insists they must, now as political philosophers) they misconceive their political mission as the democratization of philosophy, as a mission to ‘enlighten’ the citizens? Will that not denature both sophia and phronesis?

Plato himself illustrated this by writing not only his Republic or Regime but his Statesman, a dialogue on political knowledge. Knowledge implies certainty and therefore lends itself to tyranny. Socratic zeteticism prescribes what might be described as firm caution, not certainty. The Statesman “drags us through false starts, dead-ends, errors, and digressions,” imitating political debate. There is “no arithmetic precision in the art of politics, only a large measure of messiness, perhaps even futility”; if so, then political knowledge or science “cannot be simultaneously exact and complete.” Young Socrates learns that his mathematical expertise doesn’t help him much when he turns to consideration of political life because “human beings and their political needs are hard to measure properly.” Such politically necessary virtues as moderation and courage and especially justice, which has two dimensions—the “justice of equality and the justice of excellence”— do not lend themselves to mathematically precise formulae. “The city needs both sameness and difference,” unifying bonds to hold it together, to make it a city, and diversity of abilities and of interests, to enable it to supply its various needs and to adapt to changing circumstances. And when it comes to understanding human nature, what a human is, the interlocutors in the dialogue themselves fumble through an attempt to define ‘man’ himself in a quasi-mathematical process of division that yields the comical result that man is an unfeathered biped—true enough, but not quite dispositive. “In a typically Platonic way, the dialogue shows (rather than merely asserting through the speeches) that proper statesmanship resists any comprehensive and precise methodology.” 

Foucault saw this, understanding Plato’s statesman “as neither all-knowing scientist nor all-caring shepherd,” yet nonetheless “thought Plato’s rationalism played a part in the modern attempt to exercise totalitarian ‘pastoral’ power over human beings,” that the rationalism of classical political philosophy must lead to the rationalism of modern, impolitic political philosophy. Strauss disagreed. In a course he taught at the University of Chicago, he called his students’ attention to a feature of Plato’s Meno, that dialogue about teaching. “Plato,” he told them, “likes the term ‘divining.’ We all divine much more than we clearly see.” To see clearly is to know, but life is not transparent; we need to do some guessing. This doesn’t mean that laws and lawgivers offer us nothing more than guesswork and mythologizing. Lawgivers “divine fragments of the truth.” For political purposes, especially the purpose of stable unity, “the absolutization of truth is necessary—insofar as the ordinary, non-theoretical citizens understand truth.” But neither can the philosopher entirely dispense with the solid ground in which the cave has been dug. Political philosophy “begins with examining the city’s fundamental law.” In seeing its doubtful aspects, and even in ascending from the cave of convention to the light of nature, the philosopher learns two things: that his glimpses of the dazzling truth are partial, clearer and true than the view inside the cave but never comprehensive, as the sun is big and bright, and also that he “would become paralyzed if he doubted absolutely the reliability of his own senses or the intelligibility of the world.” He can ascend from the cave but he cannot live his life in the sun. He returns to the cave with new respect for its certainties and the stability they afford. He must “pass through the city” on his way out and on his way back in. Conversely, while “the statesman cannot wait on the musings of speculative thinkers” but establish the “uncomplicated respect for the sanctity of the law” citizenship demands, he must “remain flexible,” more flexible than the laws, as “a slavish obedience to tradition can lead in some circumstance to the regime’s self-destruction,” as when one might need to suspend the writ of habeas corpus during a civil war. “Necessity requires that prudence,” practical as distinguished from theoretical or speculative wisdom, “consider all possible options.” As for the citizens, they “must be united by an unshakeable common faith in the nature of the world and the basic justice of their regime, or there will not be sufficient unity to hold the city together”; “the city needs a civil religion.” But they also need to understand that the regime’s justice is indeed basic, that “the disjointed goods that define the human condition”—the justice of equality, the justice of excellence, and many others—require “moderation in both aspiration and deed.” As the saying goes, E pluribus unum. ‘Radicalism’ is exciting, but it seldom comes to much good. And just as political radicals are too often terribles simplificateurs in practice, so un-zetetic philosophers can be that in theory, failing to recognize what Strauss, following the classics, calls “noetic heterogeneity”—the recognition that nature, a unity that can be comprehended noetically, by glimpses reasoning affords the human mind—but includes “natural divisions or types” not simply reducible to a single element, such as atoms. We see dogs, individuals, ‘dog’ as a species, as ‘ideas,’ and nature as the whole in which both individuals and species are parts. We can reason about such things because the principle of non-contradiction shows both how the many things differ and in what ways they are the same. Jaffa, Ellmers recalls, “was fond of speaking about ‘the miracle of the common noun.'” Platonic political philosophy refuses to treat either the city or the cosmos by reducing its theme to a single beat. It “precludes any doctrinaire metaphysics,” as “the whole remains elusive.” Modern rationalism or Enlightenment misses that point. Ellmers remarks that modern science has in a sense discovered a correction to itself, and as a result of its faith in mathematical certainty, inasmuch as mathematical physics has brought us the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which suggests that “to capture one truth, it is necessary to let go of another.”

The attempt to achieve “complete ruling knowledge” strikes the classical political philosophers as “unnatural.” It strikes the later moderns as unnatural, too—hence the move to ‘History.’ As for the earlier moderns, it struck them as quite natural because they simplified human nature as primarily the desire first to survive and then, and above all, to acquire. If human nature is fundamentally acquisitive, then complete ruling knowledge is the one thing needful. This would lead, finally, to tyranny over “the idea of man,” a “tyranny over the whole human species,” “the total assimilation of a natural form to a human art, a true philosophic techne.” This is what the postmodernists object to, as seen in Heidegger’s animadversions against technology. And because Heidegger, for all his philosophic attention to Plato and Aristotle, failed to see the moderating, politic character of reason in those philosophers, he could make his wild, infamous claim that his philosophy registered “the inner truth and greatness” of Nazism, over against the Nazis’ rather ardent love of all technologies of conquest. The task of political philosophy today is to become politic again, which means, among other things, to argue for the importance of “civic piety,” an importance that inheres not only in its capacity to maintain political unity but in the elements of nature conventions retain, elements that reasonable men and women will identify by using their reason, their thought guided by the principle of non-contradiction.

What about “the altar of our fathers,” then? The ancient city, described by the great French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, “governed a human being with an authority so absolute that there was nothing beyond its control.” It was the opposite of Karl Popper’s “open society.” As a closed society, it justified its rule by claiming that its founder, the one who laid down its fundamental law, its regime, was a god. If it lost a war, it had been overpowered by a greater god and its citizens were rightly reduced to a condition of slavery to the conquerors and their gods. Nor is this city simply unnatural, unnatural though it may seem to ‘we moderns,’ who claim to know better. “The spirit of the closed city, with its intense and civic comradery, seems deeply embedded in the human psyche,” so much so that “part of what we are seeing in the re-emerging tribalism of both Left and Right may be a reaction to the profound emptiness in the soul created by the loss of this ‘belonging,’ an attempt to recover a sense of meaning and purpose by recreating a holy community of citizen-believers” in a world awash in “hedonistic secularism.” This is why Left and Right can no longer engage in real dialogue with one another; each regards the others as heretics, as evil. And each seeks in political life a cure for their alienation, from the angst (or at least boredom) that the designedly banal modern regimes foster as a counter to the religious wars of the early modern world.

Those religious wars differed from the Crusades conducted by the feudal regimes under the Catholic Church because they set professing Christians against professing Christians, a profoundly disturbing issue of what was intended to be a, even the religion of peace. Enter Machiavelli, charging that “Plato’s abstract, trans-political ideas of universal justice had been integrated into Christian theology,” ruining the sober realism of ancient politics, whether instantiated in poleis or in empires. “Europe now included many earthly kingdoms but had only one faith,” causing “a kind of schizophrenia, dividing citizenship from piety.” Catholic priests had replaced Plato’s philosopher-kings; initially, in Machiavelli’s estimation, this had led not to warlikeness but to lassitude, to a bizarre combination of weakness and fanaticism, otherworldliness and (merely) spiritual warfare. One way to counter this was to attempt to make Christianity into a civil religion, along the lines of the ancient city. This had the malign effect of infusing war aims with the spirit of uncompromising fanaticism, a fanaticism tapped not only by would-be Christian princes but by atheist princes masquerading as princes. With Machiavelli, “what was ultimately and most crucially lost,” and never recovered in the many iterations of ‘modernity,’ “was the classical conception of nature: the conviction that there is a fixed and intelligible order in the cosmos, outside of our will, that supplies a permanent ground of morality and justice.” As mentioned, ‘history’ and ‘science’ “become the authoritative substitutes” for natural right, but neither, “needless to say, has delivered on the promised results.” What neither history nor science can provide is “a rational understanding of the human good,” inasmuch as human nature itself must fall at the end of the project of conquering nature. As one of André Malraux’s characters laments, “Man is dead, following God, and we are left with the consequences of this strange inheritance.”

Strauss rightly saw that “faith in the rational rule of intelligent experts could not withstand the Nietzschean critique,” his realization—indeed insistence—that the science or knowledge acquired by the moderns has no moral significance (as Hume had already seen), that history or the course of events has no necessary logic to it, no more moral significance than modern science. Positivism—not only laws but all of reality made subject to human ‘positing’—will not do, and the historicism that attempts to remediate positivism is equally impotent. A partial exception to this dilemma may be seen in the regime established by the American Founders, a regime that aims at more than “comfortable self-preservation” while giving a place to both prayer and thought by limiting government to the task of guarding life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—very much including the enjoyment of physical property but also recognizing, as Madison put it, that we have a valuable form of property in those rights, by nature. This gives political life a purpose beyond convention, beyond any “easygoing moral relativism,” as Jaffa’s student, Thomas G. West, observes. This purpose is of philosophic interest, as political philosophy teaches “the inescapable primacy of the question of what is the right way of life.” 

The moderns’ error may be seen in the ‘postmoderns.’ Michel Foucault reduces not only politics but thought itself to “the power discourse,” the process whereby political power is said to produce truth. “We are forced to produce the truth of power that our society demands,” Foucault writes, as power “institutionalizes, professionalizes, and rewards its pursuit.” In Ellmers’s words, Foucault claims that truth “has no other standard, or ground, or mode of existence other than what is determined by the political power structure.” This is indeed “a quite accurate description of how today’s intellectuals perceive the world, and therefore how the ruling class,” consisting of their former students, “at least to some degree, thinks and operates” in their quest for “globalism,” the Hegelian World State, from which there will be no exit—neither in politics rightly understood, which consists of ruling and being ruled, in turn, or in philosophy, which consists in dialectical conversation between philosophers and between philosophers and non-philosophers. Instead, the human person becomes “a unit in a complex mechanism which is meant to operate efficiently,” an airplane passenger. “The system makes the decisions,” not you or your fellow no-longer-citizens. It is enough to make some young men long to become Bronze Age perverts. In tune with this mood, “Foucault explains that notions of guilt, evidence, and neutrality are merely holdovers from the older power structure.” Responsibility? What might that be? And “moral responsibility” itself was only a shadow of the virtues commended by the classics. Madison’s responsible government disappears into networks wherein no one can be held responsible because no one is treated as a person. As in the political science of Harold Lasswell, who anticipated some of the postmodernist themes, propaganda symbols replace reason, classical or modern, ideology replaces both religious conviction and philosophy as the guide to the new way of life, the new regime. 

To what extent does this new regime amount to a new version of Plato’s cave, a new set of conventions? Strauss replied that the new regime wasn’t the ancient cave, with its glimmerings of nature, but a cave beneath the cave, a construct made possible by the attempt to conquer nature, an attempt which discarded even the glimmerings of nature. “By reducing the knowable to our own mental constructs, the epistemological problem is solved by condensing reality to fit our minds” in an act of will. Instead of seeing that reality exists independently “and it is our minds that must conform” to it, that “the truth is out there,” that “the universe is intelligible,” we commit what Plato’s Socrates calls (in the Meno) “misology.” [1] Foucault “saw no escape” from either the modern or the postmodern perspective. At the same time, Foucault wanted to sympathize with the pre-modern societies that have retained a non-rationalist character. This leaves him vulnerable to what another student of Strauss, Stanley Rosen, remarks: “disinterested or scientific study of power contradicts the passionate commitment of the Left,” as “the intention to liberate subjugated knowledges contradicts both scientific objectivity and the subjugating impulse of power politics.”

This is where Strauss comes in. Although the cave beneath the cave seems to preclude any philosophic ascent, so far it has left the Bible and the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and other such folk lying around. In his own classes, Strauss “sometimes warned his students about being ‘too sophisticated.'” One of them, William B. Allen, has told the story of the time he went into Strauss’s office and tried to impress the old fellow with a learned discourse on ‘Being’—rather in the style of Heidegger. “Never talk like that,” he was advised, shortly. Years before, Jaffa had taken the point, setting his primary classroom topic the American regime as understood by its founders, a regime that isn’t simply a cave, much less a cave beneath a cave, but a ruling body, an institutional structure, a way of life aiming at what is good for human beings by nature. When it came to philosophers, Jaffa showed particular interest in Aristotle, who famously calls man a political who desires to know. “These two aspects of human nature, and the problems they bring with them, reveal themselves in countless ways wherever men are found.” They are not ‘relative’ to one or a few societies, nor are they products of some law of historical progress. And if so, whatever happens, “man’s political nature can be suppressed but neve destroyed” and “the brute instincts rebelling against mankind’s technical commodification must be guided by that other aspect of human nature; the desire to know.” If the universal, homogenous state envisioned by the rationalists among the historicists prevails, ending both politics and philosophy by denaturing human beings via some technology—bioengineering docile creatures, or whatever—there is an urgent need to resist that attempt both philosophically and politically. 

As for religion, “it would perhaps be premature to say farewell to the Bible.” It has been, so far. Strauss encouraged his students to greet the Bible, to renew the dialogue between “Athens and Jerusalem.” Ellmers asks, “What are the prospects for another Great Awakening, and what form would it take?” And what are the prospects, he goes on to ask, of resisting the temptation to treat modern science as if it were a religion or, for that matter, a philosophy—as if it could supply a way of life that could support moral and political life? “Between Hegel’s total state and Nietzschean anarchy lies another choice: self-government.”

What is to be resisted, in our status as demi-citizens in the cave beneath the cave, is hopelessness. Whether or not the recovery of common sense for citizens, piety for Christians, political philosophy or at least the study of political philosophy for those so inclined, can be achieved in the United States or elsewhere, there is not only no harm in trying, but human satisfaction. Ellmers ends with a paradox, but not a contradiction: “The immoderate skepticism of Socratic eros remains the most moderate and promising alternative to our twin political dangers of rational tyranny and tribal passions, because in its original form as the awareness of ignorance that quest offers perhaps the most powerful and humanizing antidote to dogmatic certainty: wonder.”

 

Note

1. See “Teaching Virtue?” on this website, in the category “Philosophers.”